Daniel Kachamba

Biography

Daniel James Kachamba was born in Limbe, Blantyre District, Malawi, in 1947. He was born in a musical family. His father, James Kachamba, was a guitarist of the earliest period of popular township music in what was then Nyasaland, during the late 1940s, after he had returned as a World War II veteran from Burma. Daniel’s mother, Etinala B. Gwede, was also musically inclined, having played the nkangala (mouth bow). His life-long partner and the second pillar in his early kwela-style band of the 1960s was his young brother Donald Kachamba, born 1953, who himself has become a musician/composer of international renown.

Exposed to the popular music of the time in Malawi, saba-saba, sinjonjo, vula matambo, jive, and kwela music, Kachamba’s guitar style varied from alternate bass line thumbpicking with index finger doing the melody à la country blues stylings of Mississippi John Hurt, to rumba bass patterns underneath syncopated melodic lines (also thumb and index) to condense the sounds of Congolese rumba on to one guitar.

Discography